A Thanksgiving Message for Obama’s America

Nov. 21 (Bloomberg) -- It’s a difficult Thanksgiving
season. The nation is deeply divided, facing serious threats
abroad and an uncertain economy at home. An unpopular war drags
on, and the controversial incumbent president, after a bitter
and divisive campaign, has just won re-election with barely 50
percent of the popular vote.

Welcome to November 1812. The war against the British is
going badly. President James Madison, after winning a landslide
victory in 1808, almost lost this time around. The citizens of a
worried nation, in between the name-calling and rancor,
nervously ask one another what exactly there is to be thankful
for. Is it possible that the solutions of their fraught age
could hold lessons for ours?

To find out, let us poke our heads inside the
Congregational Church in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, where the
longtime pastor, a Dartmouth graduate named Walter Harris, is
delivering his annual Thanksgiving message. Harris, nicknamed
“the sledgehammer,” is a noted contrarian who opposes, for
example, the town tax that pays his salary. His remarkable
sermon for Thanksgiving 1812 could have been delivered today.

Harris begins by announcing to his flock that although it
is Thanksgiving, he plans to “enumerate some of the national
evils under which we labor” -- evils that, two hundred years
later, echo with eerie familiarity.

Many Evils

First, he says, the nation is at war. And indeed, the War
of 1812 has been anything but a success for the American side.
Everyone assumes that when the British finally dispense with
Napoleon, they will turn their attention to the upstart United
States and prove once and for all who should have triumphed in
that late unpleasantness that began in 1776.

Here, however, Harris offers a trenchant observation. The
war has gone well, he says, when we defend our shores and badly
when we take the battle to the enemy’s provinces. Whatever one
thinks of this claim as a matter of strategy, Harris’s larger
point is about the home front: “A very great proportion of the
pious people of this land, so much doubt the necessity or
lawfulness of this war that they do not, yea, dare not, pray for
its success.” But without the good wishes and prayers of the
populace, he explains, the war cannot be won.

The second of the evils Harris enumerates is what nowadays
goes under the name incivility -- and, again, his lament will
sound familiar: “We must notice, with sorrow, the violent
political dissensions in our land.” How bad is it? This bad:
“Men of the same neighborhood have become the most virulent
enemies to one another; they cannot speak peaceably to one
another,” he says. “These divisions forebode approaching ruin.”

Closely related is the problem we have come to call
partisan gridlock: “The parties in our country, which are
pulling in different directions, are so nearly balanced, that
our real strength, to accomplish any important end, has become
very small.”

Third is the unfavorable weather, which has brought about
famine and drought: “We have reason to fear that the scarcity
will be very sensibly felt by many.”

Fourth: “The general stagnation of business, and decrease
of property, through the country.” Much of the nation, Harris
tells his flock, is “actually growing poorer.”

Fifth, and perhaps worst of all, is the impossibility of
serious discourse on these subjects. Nobody wants to listen: “It
appears that a fatal delusion has fallen upon them.” As a
result, he says, “reason, and argument, and light, and truth,
have no weight with them.”

On top of all this, the pastor warns, drinking and swearing
are out of control, crime is up and parents are “neglecting to
restrain their children.” The nation, he contends, is awash in
“covetousness and the deepest ingratitude.”

Some Solutions

Happily, Harris offers his listeners a series of practical
solutions to the problems besetting the nation. Some of these,
of course, are distinctive to the believing Christian. But
several are more general and, like his analysis of his own
troubled times, entirely applicable today.

As might be expected of a pastor, he first exhorts his
congregation to count up the reasons to be thankful. He
helpfully lists a few: “for all our national privileges that
still remain; for all our family blessings yet conferred; and
for all the individual happiness we are permitted to enjoy.”

Beyond that, he urges that Americans try to heal their
“alarming divisions” in part by putting an end to “all
bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil-speaking,
and malice.”

Yet these nasty and divisive debates, Harris insists, are
only a symptom. The greater problem is partisanship itself: “Let
all the wise and good unitedly disapprove and condemn the bitter
and provoking language of rash party-men.” The solution is
obvious: “This party-business must be done away with, or the
nation must be ruined.”

That’s basically where Harris ends. The greatest evil
confronting the country turns out to be the political parties,
which were then mere decades old, if that.

Harris, of course, is too quick to dismiss the parties,
which help remedy collective-action problems among voters and,
to a limited extent, provide a signaling function that helps
guide electoral choices. But he is entirely correct in asserting
that the partisanship that parties generate, if unchecked by the
cooler heads of the “wise and good,” does indeed lead to
bitterness and wrath and malice and all the rest.

Can we reject “the bitter and provoking language” of the
worst partisans without giving up on the idea of political
parties or a vigorous debate -- or democracy itself? That was
the challenge in Harris’s era, and 200 Novembers later, remains
the challenge in ours. His America survived its divisions and
fears and went on to thrive -- a reason that we today should
face our worrisome world in optimism. And as we chew over our
problems, let’s also spend the holiday season following Harris’s
suggestion that we take the time, no matter what we may be
suffering, to count our blessings.

Happy Thanksgiving.

(Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a
professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The
Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and the
novel “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.” The opinions
expressed are his own.)